M24

When the wild, shifting colors began to settle, Morgan could see a vastly different scene in front of him. He was standing on a low hillock, covered in short, feathery purple grass. People were milling around not far from him, talking, laughing, sitting on blankets in the sunlight, and eating. It looked almost like a day at a big park. For the most part, the people were wearing loose-fitting cottony trousers and shirts in various muted colors. Many of them were barefoot. Where the hell was he? At the base of the hill, the grassland extended for a mile or so, and then a huge, earth-colored wall rose out of the meadow. Hundreds of nearly identical little canvas tents were spread out in a quasi-orderly fashion between the hill and the wall.

“Jesus, who are you, man?” a startled-sounding voice came from behind Morgan.

“Ahm,” Morgan cleared his throat as he turned around. He looked down upon a soft-looking man in his middle years. He had smooth brown hair and a round face, and he wore a pair of loose, pale draw-string pants with a similar-looking shirt tucked in. The outfit looked very comfortable. “Hello. I’m Morgan Hall. Ensign Hall. From the Arkship? Are you guys the colonists?”

“What do you mean, man? Hell yes, we’re the colonists. Haven’t you been here? Jesus, you’re a big guy. Fuckin’ A, where’d you get that spear?” The man walked closer to Morgan, and a few other people seemed to have taken notice of him now and were drawing close. Morgan could see a monolithic dark stone standing about a dozen yards back from the man talking to him. It seemed to be situated right in the center of the hilltop, and several people were standing around it, holding their hands against its surface.

“Yeah, that’s a long story. What’s your name? Who’s in charge? Is Arthur Ballard here?” Morgan took a moment to stow his Token of Travel in his dimensional pouch, then reached a hand out to shake the guy’s hand.

“Oh, uh, sorry about that. My name’s Nels Gibson,” he stammered, reaching out a hand to shake Morgan’s. Nels’s hand felt small and soft, and Morgan had to concentrate on not squeezing too hard. Had his improved stats changed him that much?

“Hey, how tall are you, if you don’t mind the strange question?” Morgan asked, letting the guy’s hand go and stepping back a pace. More people were starting to gather.

“Um, five foot nine. Why?”

“I got some racial upgrades. You guys are aware of the System, right? You know your stats? Where it gives you the “race” stat? Yeah, I got some upgrades to that. I think I grew more than I realized. Well, that’s awkward.” Morgan positively towered over the guy. He felt like an adult around some middle schoolers as more people gathered around. A few people might have been close to his height, but he’d been five foot eleven in his old life; there was no way that was still the case. That was a weird way of thinking about it - his old life. He supposed it was accurate, though. Things had changed a lot, even before the System; Earth was hundreds of years behind him. He shook himself out of his musings and looked at the crowd of colonists. “Hey, all. I’m Morgan Hall. I know I don’t look like it, but I came here on the Pioneer-9 with the rest of you. Is Arthur Ballard around? Or is someone else in charge?”

“Hello there,” a striking woman stepped forward, speaking in a smooth, clear voice. She had long, dark hair and pale skin. What struck Morgan was that her eyes were heterochromatic - one was pale blue, and the other was a silvery color. A narrow white scar bisected her silvery eye from brow to cheek. “My name’s Olivia Bennett. Arthur is around, and he’s helping to run things, but we have sort of a small, informal council for the time being. Where did you come from, Mr. Hall?”

“Oh, hello, Ms. Bennett. I’m familiar with your work. I was a tech specialist on the Pioneer-9. Um, I came here from a place the System calls the Crucible.” Morgan reached out to shake Olivia’s hand, and she coolly grasped his hand, her grip noticeably firmer than Nels’s.

“Interesting. We knew people were missing from our counts, but we thought they’d been taken by wolves or Yeksa before we got the walls up.”

“You guys built these walls? Jesus, that’s an accomplishment. Do we still have the landers? What about the mech and other rigs?” Morgan looked around but couldn’t see any sign of heavy equipment.

“No, no, Morgan. We were able to purchase the walls and a few other buildings with the help of the System. I’m sure it’s getting more out of the bargain than we are, but we work with what we have. So you were in some place called a “crucible,” hmm? And how did you get here?” She stood back, clearly eyeing Morgan’s strange garb - his frayed black robes, his bronze-colored vambraces and greaves, his wide belt with sacks and pouches hanging from it, and his wicked-looking black spear.

“Let’s back up,” Morgan said, noting the suspicion behind Olivia’s gaze, “First of all, I’m not a threat to you. I’ve been busting my ass trying to get out of the Crucible and get to you all. I don’t know what you all have been through or what you know about the System, but I’ve been through some shit in the last couple of weeks.”

“Why you?” another voice queried before Olivia could respond. Morgan turned and saw the older, grey-bearded man and knew it was Arthur Ballard. “Why were you in this Crucible? Why were you not with the rest of us?”

“Great question. When the Noah unit woke me up to do a systems analysis…” Ballard cut Morgan off:

“What? Noah woke you up? Why? Where was the ship? Why didn’t you wake any other crew?”

“Easy; let me start from the beginning. It’s not a very long story: the Noah unit thought the sensors were messing up when we arrived at Tau Ceti because they only displayed one large planet. He woke me up to check on the sensor arrays, and while I was outside doing a physical check, the ship entered what I’m assuming was the border of the System’s controlled space.” Several conversations started up, and the noise became too much for Arthur.

“Everyone, calm down! I want to hear the rest of this!”

“Anyway, when the System noticed us, everything went dark for me, but I could hear it in my head. It was taking stock of us; it counted how many of us there were, it noticed Noah-9 and said it ‘deleted’ him. I think it said something about Noah having zero Energy affinity. The System addressed me and said I was separate from the rest of you, and I tried to explain why I was the only one awake, but it cut me off and tossed me in the Crucible. That’s it. That’s the whole story.” Morgan folded his arms, starting to feel a bit defensive.

“I knew it!” Olivia interjected, “I knew the System wanted us for our access to Energy. It’s parasitic! Why else would it discard Noah-9? He was of no value to the System!”

“Ahem, alright. Well, as I was saying, after that, I don’t have any idea what happened with you all. I woke up in the Crucible and have been fighting and running for my life ever since. If it weren’t for…” Morgan suddenly stopped talking and activated his Guardian’s Senses ability, thinking of Issa. There she was! Faint, but much closer than when she’d disappeared from the mountain top. She felt like she was, judging by where the sun was sinking toward the horizon, to the southeast and less than a hundred miles away. “Uh, sorry about that. I just remembered something. Anyway, if it weren’t for a friend I met in there, I don’t know if I would’ve made it out alive.”

“A friend? Another colonist?” Arthur’s eyes widened, and he leaned forward.

“No. I’m pretty sure she’s a native of this world.”

“Sentient?” Olivia stepped closer.

“Yes, sentient, and damn smart, in fact. You guys haven’t met any sentient natives? Wait, you met Yeksa. I think they’re primitive, but I’m pretty sure they have a society.” Morgan looked around while he spoke, once again marveling at the tall earthen walls.

“Well, we never got a chance to talk to the Yeksa - it was straight to fighting for our lives with them. Tell us about this friend of yours - do you think her people will want to ally with us?” Olivia pressed.

“Yes, and what about this planet? You were awake to see it from the ship’s sensors. Which one are we on? E? F?” Arthur spoke almost simultaneously with Olivia. Other people were beginning to encroach closer to their conversation, and Morgan was starting to feel a little claustrophobic.

“Alright, alright, I’ll answer all I can, but then I want a tour of this place, and I’d like a spot where I can place my tower. Yes, before you ask, I said tower. I got an award from the System while in the Crucible - I have an item that will, supposedly, become a tower when I activate it.” The next few minutes stretched into an hour as Morgan answered as many questions as possible about the planet, the Crucible, Issa and her people, and even everything he’d learned about gaining levels and improving his race. The way he saw it, for all he knew, these were the last humans in the universe, and they needed to work together.

Later, after Morgan had talked himself out and people had wandered off, Arthur left Morgan in Olivia’s hands to tour the colony. The two of them were strolling down the side of the hillock toward the forge building. “So Bronwyn, the actual VR champ from Earth, built this forge?”

“That’s right!” Olivia smiled and began to speak animatedly, “she rescued some colonists from Yeksa, and the System rewarded her with the building. I bet it works similarly to your tower. She just read some scroll by the Colony Stone, and this building grew out of the ground. It was pretty amazing.”

“Well, that’s great. Yeah, the System seems to enjoy incentivizing people to do things with ‘quests.’ So far, it hasn’t tried to get me to do anything I didn’t want to do. Well, not directly, at least. Sometimes I feel like its quests are passive-aggressive or like it’s testing me or something. I fucking felt constantly manipulated while I was in the Crucible.”

“Can you elaborate on that? What do you mean by passive-aggressive?” Oliva stopped, and her face grew gravely serious, and Morgan suddenly remembered that she’d been a world-renowned research scientist back on Earth.

“Maybe I’m using the wrong term, but I’ll give you an example: When I first met my friend Issa, she was badly wounded. I was trying to encourage her and said something like, ‘we’ll get you out of here,’ and the System popped up a quest for me to keep her alive for a week. The kicker was that there was a penalty for failure, and it gave me a yes or no option to accept. Like it wanted to make me put some skin in the game, so to speak.”

“Interesting. Interesting,” Olivia said, nodding and rubbing at her chin. They talked about the System and how it had changed its tone since the “orientation” the colonists had gone through. Olivia told Morgan about Bronwyn and her quest to clear the cave in the woods. About how the System had labeled what lurked within as evil.

“Oh, really? That’s a first for me. What did it end up being?” Morgan asked, almost offhandedly.

“Um,” Olivia started, but she had gone sort of white, and she self-consciously reached up to touch the scar on her face.

“Oh, uh, are you okay? You don’t have to talk about it. Believe me; there’s some shit that went down in the Crucible that I never want to think about again.”

Olivia shook her head and said, “It was bad, I won’t dwell on it, but some of us died, some got hurt,” she gestured to her face, “and we ran. It really messed with Bronwyn. She’s out trying to level up to face that thing again.” She shuddered a little bit, then shook her head and started walking again. “We haven’t built anything along the northern wall yet, and if your building is a tower, I think the northeast corner would be great; you’d have a view out over the plains and of the mountains in the distance.

“Oh, mountain views, eh?” Morgan took the hint and changed the subject.

“I’d think so. Do you know how tall the tower is? The ground slopes slightly downward as you approach the northern wall, so you’ll have a view if you pick a spot a couple of hundred yards back from the wall. Unless it’s a really short tower.” She grinned.

“Well, to be honest, I’m not sure. It just might be positively squat.” Morgan laughed, and Olivia joined in.

“You seem all right, Morgan Hall; I think Bronwyn will like you.” Once again, Olivia’s face grew somber, and they kept walking in silence for a while. Eventually, she broke the silence, “You know, she’s pretty important to me. When she gets back, I know she’ll go after the thing in that cave again. Do you think you’d consider going with her? You’re the only person I know that’s higher level than she is.”

“You worry about her, huh?”

“Very much, Morgan. Very much.”

“Well, I’d have to be a real creep to say no to that, wouldn’t I?” He smiled, and it was easy because he didn’t know what was waiting for him in that cave, but he knew that he liked Olivia, and he couldn’t abide that haunted look on her face every time this subject came up. “Hey, did I tell you what my class is called? I’m known as a Hollow Guard, and it’s my job to get between my friends and trouble.”